Tom Wilson says he spent many sleepless nights this summer after submitting his memoir, Beautiful Scars: Steeltown Secrets, Mohawk Skywalkers and the Road Home, to his publisher.

It wasn’t just the typical nervousness of a first-time author. Nor was he particularly worried about whether those he wrote about would remember things differently or be offended by his depiction. It was a deeper anxiety.

Even for an autobiography, Beautiful Scars is so personal that putting it out there made him feel naked and vulnerable. The centre of the book is a twist that cuts straight to the heart of the 58-year-old musician’s sense of self. He says he felt as if he was sending everybody a witheringly personal letter, revealing for the first time his true identity.

“I think I was ultimately loving and respectful to everybody in the book,” says Wilson, in a phone interview with Postmedia during a book-tour stop in Montreal. “But it is revealing. I’ve said before, I feel like I’m showing my ass in public. And when you’re standing there in public with your ass out, you gotta pull someone else’s pants down, too, so you don’t feel so alone.”

Beautiful Scars is not without the hallmarks of a rock ‘n’ roll memoir. It includes the rags-to-riches tale — or at least those modest “riches” afforded by Canadian success in the music business — that follows Wilson’s impoverished upbringing in the colourful, rough-and-tumble steel town of Hamilton, Ont., to his success in the 1990s as part of the band Junkhouse and, later, the roots trio Blackie and the Rodeo Kings. It chronicles his self-destructive behaviour — his drug addiction, alcoholism and infidelities — and his industry struggles. It talks about years lost in a haze of drugs and his lingering regrets as a husband and father.

But the heart of the book is a secret that was kept from him most of his life. Raised in Hamilton by an eccentric Montrealer named Bunny and her blind war-hero husband, George, Wilson always suspected he didn’t really belong to them. But it wasn’t until he was in his mid 50s that the truth was finally revealed. Janie, the Indigenous woman he was told was his cousin, was actually his mother. Bunny, who was actually his great aunt, took this knowledge to her grave, although would occasionally and ominously drop hints that she stood guard over a secret about the boy she raised as her son.

“I could say that writing this book has saved me hundreds of thousands of dollars in therapy,” Wilson says. “At the same time, when I found out about this I was more unsettled for the 53 years before than I am now. I always suspected I was adopted. At the age of 4, at the age of 10, at the age of 14, I confronted Bunny and said ‘Am I adopted? you guys are really old. I don’t look like you guys.’ And every time, from the age of four, her response was ‘There are secrets about you that I’ll take to my grave.’ Which is a rather dramatic. She’s from Montreal, so I say there’s quite a flare of colour and drama in almost everything she did. She didn’t stop in shutting me down. Even in shutting me down, there was a beautiful Montreal style to it.”

As for Bunny’s reasoning for keeping this secret for so long, Wilson admits he is not completely sure. But he points out she was of a different generation and likely thought that growing up a Mohawk in Hamilton circa the late 1960s and early 1970s would not be an easy life. Bunny had grown up near the Kahnawake reserve in Quebec. Two of her sisters had married Mohawk men.

“The way they thought about things was a couple worlds away,” Wilson says. “Her reasoning? I haven’t really figured that out. I’ve had hints of it. One of them is that I believe that she thought it would be easier for me to be raised as a French-Irish kid in Hamilton than it would be to be brought up a Mohawk kid.”

“She knew how hard life could be as a Mohawk, particularly in the era she was from,” he adds. “I think she wanted to relieve a part of that pressure. That was part of it and the other was that she f — king started a secret and she couldn’t let go of it. And she protected that secret right to the grave, just like she said.”

Wilson admits that, at times, it felt like he was in the “Witness Protection Program” with Bunny cutting off contact with anyone who pried to much. She also didn’t allow Janie, who was certainly a presence for much of Wilson’s childhood, to ever get too close to her son even when they lived in the same house. She was not allowed to bathe or feed or comfort her baby, a denial that Wilson writes would have been “mental torture” for her.

“It was a battle writing this book because I got very angry,” Wilson says. “I wrote with a lot of anger at times, but I had to get through that. To fight that anger you have to speak with your heart, speak with respect and honesty and suddenly all that anger starts to go away. Because, as I put in the end of the book, Bunny and George gave me a fighting chance. There’s not much more you can ask for than being given a fighting chance.”

While this secret is the main thrust of the book, Beautiful Scars certainly covers other ground. The early chapters about Wilson’s upbringing are full of colourful characters that were part of life in the working-class neighbourhood of Hamilton where he grew up: war veterans, low-end mobsters, former wrestlers and general tough guys.

It traces the development of his interest in music as well, including how he ingeniously and illegally acquired his first guitar and Bunny’s many gifts, maybe shoplifted, of albums when he was young, which included everything from Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks to the Captain and Tennille.

On the surface, it seems like he doesn’t hold back when depicting his addictions and stints in rehab. As it turns out, he did.

“I already danced to that tune,” Wilson says. “I already lived through it. Going back to it was easy for me but wasn’t that easy for other people. I highlighted a few moments when things were really getting out of hand, but things got way out of hand a lot. I had to pick and choose my spots. I didn’t want that whole section of the book just to be me with a rolled-up bill in my nose. That would be kind of gross and it wouldn’t be that poetic, either. One of the things I wanted to achieve with this book is to give this some colour and some poetry.”

And, as with most memoirs, it’s a story that continues to evolve. For the past couple of years, Wilson has been in contact with his newly discovered extended family. The main thrust of the book — which Wilson describes as “the process of being born a Mohawk baby and it taking me 53 years to become a Mohawk man” — is a journey that continues.

“It’s not a fly-by-night effort,” Wilson says. “I say this with respect when I say I’m not some white guy who runs away on the weekend to sweat lodges and burns sage all around him. This isn’t a weekend recreation for me, this is who I am. It took me 53 years to discover it. I’m 58 now. If it comes to me in the next five minutes, I’ll let you know. But it might come to me in the next 20 years. I have to respect it. I have to be patient.”

Tom Wilson will be at the Memorial Park Library on Wednesday, Dec. 6 at 7 p.m. Visit wordfest.com.

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